My daughter's college friends are obsessed with this simple dice game called LCR Wild. Each turn, you roll up to three dice marked L, C, R or Wild - passing chips left, right, to a center pot, or using Wild to steal from anyone. As she explains: "Chips that go to the center are eliminated from play, so the game gets more intense as the supply dwindles. You can theoretically win the center pot with three wild rolls, but I've never seen it happen!" The last player with chips wins. Perfect balance of luck and light strategy that works for 3 or 30 people. — MF

For Wordle fans who want more strategy, try Bongo (free online). It's a daily puzzle where you place letter tiles on a grid to create words across five rows, with a bonus word snaking down through them. Each puzzle also contains the guest creator's hidden "purple words." It's become part of my evening routine, right after Wordle and Connections. — MF

Remember how awful the Battleship board game was? This solitaire online version is nothing like that. Think Sudoku with boats, with a dash of Minesweeper thrown in.. Instead of random guessing, you use logic to figure out where ships are hiding. — MF

Over the weekend, my daughter and I played an unusual video game called Papers, Please. In this single-player game (which came out in 2013), you work as a border checkpoint inspector for Arstotzka, a fictional country resembling a 1980s Soviet state. Your job is to examine the documents of people attempting to enter the country and decide whether to grant them entry. The game presents moral dilemmas as your daily pay is usually insufficient to cover rent, food, and heat. Your family constantly faces the risk of starvation and illness. This raises the question: Should you start accepting bribes and other dubious offers from spies and smugglers to make ends meet? Despite its intentionally crude graphics, reminiscent of 1980s video games, I found myself completely engrossed in the gameplay. — MF

I play the NY Times’ Connections game every day, where the objective is to organize 16 words into four groups, with each group containing words that are connected to each other in some way. A game called Same Energy Snap is like Connections, but for photos instead of words. In this game, you are presented with a 4x3 grid of images, and your task is to find pairs of photos that share a similar vibe or "energy." — MF